Unholy Alliances

“Angels & Demons” and “Summer Hours.”

Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer in Ron Howard’s new adaptation of a Dan Brown novel.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

“The Da Vinci Code”—both the 2003 novel and the 2006 movie—mesmerized audiences with puzzles and bloody horrors, while purporting to edify them with talk of religion and art history. Yet one element in the movie broke through the pretense—the sight of an actor having a good time. Ian McKellen, as Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Holy Grail, wriggled his thick eyebrows and let out his mighty baritone in torrents of expository fervor. Like Laurence Olivier shouting in merriment forty years ago in “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” McKellen was signalling to us that the material was rot. Sir Leigh explained that an extraordinary secret about Jesus had been hushed up for millennia and that, if it were to be exposed, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church would collapse. McKellen may have been playing for laughs, but the director, Ron Howard, and the screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, adapting Dan Brown’s world-conquering best-seller (forty million copies sold by 2006, eighty million by now), were not. They illustrated Sir Leigh’s lecture with a sombre slide show of devotions, persecutions, and slaughters. The movie quivered with expectation. As the entire world now knows, however, “the greatest secret in modern history” turned out to be an old yarn: Jesus, a fleshly man, married Mary Magdalene, who was not a prostitute but one of the disciples, and she bore him a child.

Sir Leigh concluded with a zinger: at the Council of Nicea, in 325, the Church fathers created a false, pure Jesus, and consolidated their power as a caste of male celibates—the priesthood and the hierarchy—by systematically downgrading women. In “Angels & Demons,” a companion to “The Da Vinci Code,” no one has as much fun as McKellen, but I kept thinking of him, because Sir Leigh’s lecture so clearly illustrates Dan Brown’s opportunism. As one pondered whether the charges were true or false, one couldn’t help noticing that Brown, having set himself up as a celebrant of marital pleasure, with the Magdalene story, had created a hero, Dr. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a professor of “symbology” at Harvard, who is a chaste and lonely man—a kind of secular priest. I doubt that Brown was being ironic. He threw Langdon into internecine Church wars, turning him into a detective with special skills as a reader of arcane inscriptions and codes. My guess is that he couldn’t resist stealing Sherlock Holmes—literature’s most popular eunuch—as a character type. Brown drew on the mystique of male chastity even as he was ostensibly overthrowing it.

Brown published “Angels & Demons” in 2000, three years before “The Da Vinci Code.” But the two books are of a piece, and the same team behind the first movie—Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman—made the new one (joined this time by the screenwriter David Koepp). If you’ve got a successful racket going, don’t change it. There’s the reliable mumbo jumbo of secret societies, insignias, codes, tombs, uncanny inscriptions. There is fire and torment, and unspeakable practices, dwelled upon at length. And there are puzzles and potted bits of art history, bristling with unexpected interest. It seems that great paintings and statues play a leading role in ancient conspiracies. Da Vinci knew Vatican secrets; so did Raphael. (Brown doesn’t bother with minor artists.) At times, the material isn’t all that different from the buttered-popcorn thrills of the recent “Mummy” movies, starring the beefy Brendan Fraser. But Brown and now Ron Howard have added an incendiary element to trash—open hostility toward the Catholic Church. The excitable William Donohue, of the Catholic League, may be predictable in his indignation about “Angels & Demons,” but he isn’t necessarily wrong. The books and the movies turn Church ritual and mystery into a creep show. “Code” had an albino in a cassock who regularly flogged himself in front of a crucifix, and a dying man writing long-winded coded messages in his own blood. “Angels & Demons” has fanatics searing inscriptions into the flesh of their enemies with a branding iron. No doubt, the Church could show more contrition for its many sins, but it may not deserve Brown and Howard, who seem to have a thing about gaudy displays of sadism and self-mutilation—a taste for gothic exploitation that sells well all over the world. The international box-office gross for “The Da Vinci Code” was three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Dan Brown is just mad for cabals. (Right now he is probably writing a novel revealing how Skull & Bones orchestrated the trouble in the Swat Valley in order to vindicate the Bush Administration and sweep Jeb into power.) One of the secret societies in “Code” was the Priory of Sion, which had allegedly been in operation for a thousand years, protecting Jesus’ bloodline as it passed down through Merovingian kings and other descendants. In fact, the Priory of Sion was a hoax created, in the nineteen-fifties, by a Frenchman who wanted to ascend to a French throne that no longer existed. The new movie presents another sect: the Illuminati, a group of freethinking geniuses, including Galileo and Bernini, who through the ages have fought the Church’s antipathy to science and have in turn been persecuted. It’s probably pointless to note that the actual Illuminati got started in Bavaria, not Rome, and a hundred years later than the movie says, and that groups within the Church, especially the Jesuits, have at times encouraged scientific research more vigorously than the current Republican Party. There’s no way to fight this stuff.

Furiously busy, the Illuminati steal some antimatter generated by the accelerator at CERN, the particle-physics site on the Swiss-French border, and plant it in the Vatican. The Church, again, is on the verge of destruction—not just physically but in its essence. If antimatter is, as scientists in the movie believe, the source of life, then what is God’s role in creation? The Illuminati have also kidnapped four cardinals, and are killing them in freaky ways, one at a time, at important art-historical sites. While all this is going on, the other cardinals are meeting in solemn conclave. The Pope has died, and they have to choose a new man. Are the Illuminati trying to put one of their own in the papacy?

The Higher Questions are delicately sprinkled throughout the clerical bloodbath and an endless chase. Langdon and an Italian scientist from CERN, Dr. Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), bounce all over Rome, and the movie turns into a treasure hunt of sorts, with, for example, the spear in Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” in one church, pointing toward his fountain in the Piazza Navona, where a cardinal is about to be drowned.

The Church, miffed by “The Da Vinci Code,” refused Howard access to the Vatican for “Angels & Demons,” so he re-created St. Peter’s Square in the parking lot of the Hollywood Park racetrack. The sets are convincing, but why has Ron Howard, who made the impressively accurate “Apollo 13,” fallen among frauds and daft dreamers? Apart from conspiracy theorists, who really believes in hokum like Dan Brown’s? Gullibility and pockets of anti-Catholic feeling are too simple as explanations for the worldwide appeal of “The Da Vinci Code.” Something more complicated is going on in which, precisely, not believing—the enjoyment of humbug, the crazier the better—is part of the turn-on. If these movies made any damned sense, the public response might be no more than a yawn.

The French writer-director Olivier Assayas has recently made nasty erotic thrillers (“Demonlover” and “Boarding Gate”) about the impersonal brutality of global capitalism. But, in the new “Summer Hours,” he is working in a calmer and more lyrical style. Reaching back to humanist masters like Renoir, he brings the global economy to bear on the fate of a bourgeois French family. A woman in her seventies (Edith Scob), the niece and possibly the lover of a deceased French painter, dies at her home outside Paris, and her three grown children, who were brought up there, have to decide what to do with the house, the Art Nouveau furniture, and the paintings, by Corot and other artists, that they lived with. Of the three, only the eldest (Charles Berling), an economics professor in Paris, wants to keep the place; his brother (Jérémie Renier) lives in Shanghai, where he runs a sneaker factory, and his careless and harried sister (Juliette Binoche), a designer in New York, is rapidly becoming Americanized.

It doesn’t take us long to realize that the house is France itself—cultivated, beautiful, but no longer central in the global era. The movie takes a ruminative turn. What will happen if the house is sold, the collection given to the Musée d’Orsay, the memories dissipated? It’s a tragedy, but how big a tragedy? What happens to art when it passes from private worship to public scrutiny? In the end, Assayas, shooting the film with relaxed, flowing camera movements, gives his love not to beautiful objects but to the disorderly life out of which art is made. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.